To watch this dreamlike and floatingly indeterminate movie, with its eerily composed images and murmuringly inaudible near-wordlessness, is to enter a state of bewilderment and discombobulation or perhaps of scepticism indefinitely deferred – starting with that title. Whose kindness? Has it really survived? Because it looks very much as if, in this scary apocalyptic world, what has survived is the opposite of kindness.
We find ourselves in a beautiful, but tough and unforgiving landscape of desert and mountain, for which writer-director Rolf de Heer has used the Flinders mountain ranges of South Australia. Some terrible catastrophe (perhaps chemical or biological) has caused mass infection and death among white people, whose survivors have to wear gas masks, but has not affected people of colour, who are still harassed and tyrannised and enslaved by these sinister masked figures. Some of the overclass wear a military-style peaked cap with the gas mask, reminding me of the famous image of the bandaged traffic warden in Mick Jackson’s nuclear horror Threads.
One of the slaves is kept in a tiny cage, outside a house in which the gas-mask wearers seem to be having a weird party; a cake in the shape of the local landscape is being cut, perhaps symbolising some callous divvying up of territory. This woman, called simply BlackWoman in the credits and played with quiet grace by Mwajemi Hussein, is then towed out in her cage into the desert and left there, surreally and terribly alone. She has no food or water but, in this stylised and theatricalised movie, this is not as important as the idea of imprisonment.
Very often there is something intriguingly abstract about the images De Heer contrives. As with his earlier movie, Ten Canoes from 2006, the movie looks like something Peter Brook might have put on stage. BlackWoman manages to force her way out of the cage by snapping off a loose bit of metal and using it to loosen one of the cage panels. (Later, this resourceful character, after being re-enslaved, will use a salvaged bit of wire to saw through her neck manacle.)
BlackWoman walks about, taking some shoes from a white man’s corpse but almost immediately having those taken off her at gunpoint by someone else. She helps a paralysed white man who, along with his wife, is in the final stages of the illness, and then finds herself in some kind of abandoned museum whose mannequins of white authority she merely smiles at, tapping one on the head – and allowing us to realise that the real thing would do something a lot nastier to her. She takes some clothing and a rifle and heads off, but then gives this (unloaded) rifle to another terrified figure on the road. BlackWoman’s kindness has survived, at all events.
Finally, she daubs her face with white ash and, wearing a gas mask, is able to disguise herself as a white person, and befriends two South Asian teenagers (played by Deepthi Sharma and Darsan Sharma) – but winds up being captured again and put to work in a grim factory. The whole strange odyssey is to come full circle, asking to us re-examine the sense in which all this has been happening.
The Survival of Kindness has static elements of an art installation, a non-narrative dream state that is part arresting, part frustrating. It sometimes feels as if its events and encounters could be reshuffled and shown in any order, and on occasion it is spinning its wheels dramatically. Yet there is a real intensity to the film, especially at the very beginning in which BlackWoman’s eyes and hands loom in extreme closeup (a visual mannerism that is not used in the rest of the film). It is an elegant reverie about the violence and the stoicism beneath the surface of ordinary life.
• The Survival of Kindness screened at the Berlin film festival.
